CAIDA is researching and implementing modifications to BGP routing that
aggregate prefixes into equivalence classes (policy atoms) based
on common AS path from a given topological location. The motivation
behind development of BGP atomization mechanisms is to achieve
potential savings in computation and communication costs (by absorbing
routing dynamics of prefixes into coarser grained atoms), as well as
reduction in BGP table size (there will be far fewer atoms than
prefixes).
A good introduction to atoms from Tel Aviv University is available
here.

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Router Development Tasks

Develop an atomized router, a BGP router with extensions for
atoms. The router should be deployable in the Internet without
breaking BGP or forwarding.
The router is based on Zebra
BGP router code base.
Implementations based on previous and current atoms architectures
completed. Source code to be released by February 2004.